Hello! I would like to catalogue my library (I estimate in the low thousands but I am unsure of the precise number). I would like to keep tracks of several things, from the “obvious” like author, title, publisher, edition, to more personal like “when”/“where” did I get it. Was it a gift? Is a lucky find from that one trip to Paris, etc.
What’s the best way to go about it? A physical collections of cards ? An app? I would like it to be selfhosted (maybe using sqlite as a backend?)
Any idea, suggestion or anything (including your experience doing something similar!) is welcome!
You could just make a spreadsheet. Not everything has to be an app.
On the Fediverse there’s https://bookwyrm.social/ and https://inventaire.io/welcome (though tbh no idea if that is federating, I don’t think so).
bookwyrm.social is a great federated replacement for GoodReads. I’m https://bookwyrm.social/user/BobQuasit there.
As for experiences: Used Inventaire a few years back, metadata was a nightmare, it was trying to pull data from Wikidata (nice in theory) but did not check if e.g. the author already existed, so there were five of them with varying degrees of data. No fun.
Bookwyrm is pretty cool, made the mistake to go to a small instance that was plagued by technical server problems, tried to export the books I had already put in and import it to a bigger instance, didn’t work (and was somehow not supposed to, I was later told 🤷♀️ Though that’s a feature that is apparently worked on). Other then that it’s petty nice, pulls data from Openlibrary, which works very well and you can also add metadata to OL if it’s not there. And the whole social thing with following people and writing reviews, good stuff.
I used to use Delicious Library but the developer went to work for Apple and he can’t develop the app any longer. I switched to Book Tracker but it’s trying to be more than I want so I’m not set on it.
Sounds like what you need is a database.
Maybe have a look at Airtable and Notion? Both have database capabilities and are quite user friendly.
Both are (or can be) basically relational databases, so you have a table for authors, one for genres maybe, one for physical location, and one for books. You create a new book, and that “form” then gives you fields for Title, Description, Rating, whatever you need, and then pulls data from the other tables for Author, Genre, etc.
If you’re not used to relational databases, the Golden Rule is basically:
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If a data type is unique (e.g. Title, Description), it stays with the “product” (book, in your case).
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If the data type can be used for more than one item (e.g. Author, Genre), it should (probably) have its own table.
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You can take it a step further and make tables for all Descriptions, Titles, etc., and then those get related to the book by a unique key, but this is probably unnecessary for your use case.
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All of this is incredibly simplified, and if anyone who works with databases sees it, I’m sure I’ll get corrected 😅
Anyway, you might not need to think too much about any of the above, as both platforms have user contributed templates!
Have a look at this list of free Notion ‘Books Templates’, or this Airtable ‘Book Catalog’ template 👍
Hi! Thanks for your reply. I work with databases and I don’t need to correct anything, just thank you for devoting a bit of your time to my question!
